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Outside a Georgia polling place Tuesday, a woman sitting at a folding table asked departing voters to fill out a paper survey. The form was part of an exit poll. It asked voters how they voted, their views on both parties and what they think about the direction of the country.
The answers will help shape how news anchors across the country explain the election tonight.
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But the folding table is just one part of a major operation. Most of the roughly 100,000 voters in this year’s survey answered online or by phone before Election Day, according to SSRS, the research firm behind the survey major networks will use tonight.
The responses are turned into data within hours.
SSRS doesn’t set up its tables just anywhere. In each of the 15 states where voters are interviewed in person, the firm picks 30 polling places, favoring precincts with higher Election Day turnout in 2024.
Interviewers don’t pick who they ask, either. They approach every “nth” voter leaving. That could mean every third or fifth person, with a goal of completing at least 50 questionnaires per location.
The survey has 20 to 25 questions and takes most voters about five minutes, according to SSRS. Voters fill it out anonymously with paper and pencil.
After voters finish, they fold the sheet and drop it into a survey box. Three times on Election Day, interviewers call a data center to relay the answers, and workers update the exit poll throughout the day.
SSRS uses several hundred phone operators to process tens of thousands of questionnaires in time for election night, according to the firm.
Those answers are then combined with SSRS’s larger survey of voters conducted online and by phone in the prior weeks. The initial results go out at 5 p.m. ET, but networks don’t report anything that could hint at a winner until a state’s polls close.
Not everyone agrees to take the survey, and SSRS accounts for that. Interviewers note the apparent age, race and sex of voters who decline, and use that information to adjust the results. If older voters skip the survey more often, for example, the older voters who did answer count more.
That matters because some voters are more reluctant than others. In recent elections, Republicans and Trump supporters have been less willing to take exit polls, which can overstate Democratic support, said Michael Traugott, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
“Pollsters have developed new weighting schemes to adjust for that phenomenon, making the polls more like statistical models rather than straightforward polls,” Traugott told Straight Arrow, via email.
The numbers released early Tuesday will likely change by the morning. Once election officials count votes, SSRS weights the survey to match each state’s actual results, so the poll can more accurately show how different groups voted.
With so many voters surveyed, the exit poll can be incredibly precise, though that precision fades in the finer details.
Nationally, SSRS expects a margin of error of about 0.6 percentage points in either direction. That’s how far a result could be off because only some voters were surveyed. In individual states, where the sample size is smaller, the margin ranges from about 2 percentage points in battlegrounds like Georgia to more than 8 percentage points in North Dakota.
Unlike the vote count, the exit poll isn’t meant to pick winners. Its job is to explain how different groups voted and why, according to The Associated Press.
A poll is only as good as its answers, so if voters lied, the results could be skewed. But Traugott said there’s no sign of that.
“There is no indication of dishonest or fake responses in the exit polls, although there may be a nonresponse bias that the exit pollsters are trying to deal with,” he said.
The survey’s setup may help. Voters fill out the questionnaire themselves rather than answering an interviewer out loud. A study by survey researchers Allyson Holbrook and Jon Krosnick has found people are less likely to give socially acceptable answers instead of true ones when they fill out a survey themselves.
As more people vote early or by mail, the folding table is becoming a smaller part of the Election Day picture, and blending it with everything else is getting harder, Traugott said.
“This creates a new issue for the exit poll operations: What are the correct or appropriate ratios with which to combine the data from these different sources?”
According to media bias experts at AllSides
Awarded a perfect reliability rating from NewsGuard
Exit polls shape how election results are explained on TV, and understanding how they work helps viewers assess what the data can and cannot show.
Early exit poll results released at 5 p.m. ET are adjusted after actual vote counts come in, so figures viewers see on election night will likely differ by morning.
State-level exit poll margins of error range from about 2 percentage points in battlegrounds like Georgia to more than 8 percentage points in states like North Dakota, limiting precision for smaller populations.
According to a University of Michigan professor, Republicans and Trump supporters have been less willing to participate, which pollsters attempt to correct through statistical weighting adjustments.
According to media bias experts at AllSides
Awarded a perfect reliability rating from NewsGuard
According to media bias experts at AllSides.
Perfect reliability rating, according to experts at NewsGuard
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